Living Large In Our Little House

This week, I had to make the third trip to our new den­tist since our move to Our Little House. He reminds me a lot of the man who was my first den­tist (and Dale’s since we grew up in the same town).

My mother helped calm my fears of the den­tist as a child, but the small town den­tist also had a lot to do with it. He wasn’t scary, nor did he make the vis­its seem they should be.

I remem­ber him as being older – although when you’re a kid, every­one is “older” – and a friendly, talk­a­tive type.

Like the rest of my fam­ily, my teeth didn’t seem to get a good start and I had a mouth full of cav­i­ties that usu­ally required at least a cou­ple of fol­low up vis­its once the oblig­a­tory clean­ing and check up was com­pleted before school began each fall. He always com­pli­mented me on my good behav­ior and much to my mother’s delight, com­pli­mented her as well.

Although I remem­ber whis­pers of his drink­ing habits, he never seemed drunk when I was there and he must have done a pretty good job, as our den­tist in this small town mar­veled at his work, some of it now more than 40 years old.

I broke a tooth eat­ing a ham­burger when we first moved here. I ignored it because we had so many other things to deal with dur­ing the move. For some rea­son, I found excuses to avoid find­ing a new den­tist here until just six months ago when the tooth started send­ing sharp reminders more often.

As when I was a kid, I shouldn’t have wor­ried. Our new den­tist def­i­nitely doesn’t drink, but he always seems happy doing what he’s doing and like the den­tist I had when I was a kid, is a very easy going, but talk­a­tive guy. He even rec­om­mended Dale for a job when another patient was look­ing for some­one, although Dale had already been called back to the boat com­pany. Like the den­tist we had as kids, his wife is his den­tal assis­tant. This one also has his daugh­ter as the office man­ager, a true fam­ily operation.

On our last trip “home,” we were dis­mayed to see the old den­tists office is not a dentist’s office any­more at all, but some­thing else that fur­ther removes the area from it’s small town ori­gins, the place we grew up in.

On the flip side, this town is start­ing to remind me more of the small town atmos­phere in which we were raised. Our new dentist’s office is in a con­verted house and although more tech­no­log­i­cally advanced than the office we went to in the 1960s and 70s, reminds me of those days long ago when our home­town was not an annexed sub­urb of a city.

It’s a good feel­ing when even the usu­ally unpleas­ant task of going to the den­tist makes me feel as if I’m home.

Have you ever resisted chang­ing doc­tors, den­tists or even your hair styl­ist, to be pleas­antly sur­prised and maybe even lik­ing them more than the one you had before?